Kanika: My name is Kanika Gupta. I’m the chief catalyst at SoJo. We’re an early-stage startup that works at the intersection of technology, social change and online education. So we’re developing a series of online learning tools, web-based applications, that help people who have ideas for social change develop their ideas, develop themselves and take these ideas into action.

What we do if someone has got an idea is we find them a starting point. What SoJo has done is we curate content and knowledge that exists in a variety of different sources and deliver it in a way that’s accessible. The problem we find now on the Internet is that there’s just too much information. So you can spend hours on websites and on Google trying to find stuff and not actually get anywhere. So we’re developing an intuitive software that recognizes what people are looking for, prompts them on a suggested path on how they should carry out their journeys and ultimately, we’re helping them find answers to questions they might not even know to ask in the first place.

It’s all about the journey, when you think of entrepreneurship or innovation and starting something new. It’s not about the endpoint, and that’s the narrative we see right now in media everywhere, of the exit strategy and what was achieved and was the failure. But what we’re often missing is that journey. What are people learning through that process? What are the decisions that were made and what are the repercussions of those decisions and how did they learn and grow from them? So SoJo’s motto is “Celebrating the Journey,” and that’s what we’re all about. Telling people that it’s okay if you don’t know where to start, it’s important that you do start, and that you’ll figure it out along the way.

For all the innovators that use our platform, it’s a way for them to share their story. Both through seeing other people’s stories, other people’s journeys, but giving more reflection to their own personal journey. And we encourage people to think, to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, what their steps look like, what their fears are, and to document them. Because only when you document do you realize, is this holding you back? Or how can you build on this to get you closer towards achieving your goals?

Summary:

SoJo is an intuitive web-based learning tools for developing ideas

Aims to answer questions users may not have thought to ask in the first place

In entrepreneurship, the journey is as informative and important as the endpoint